Name one bad emotion you’ve felt.
If you are like most people, you mentioned anger. Or guilt. Or envy. Or pride. Or resentment. Or sadness.
None of those emotions is inherently a bad one. All emotions do is show you something you might otherwise be missing.
Anger shows you where you have cared, since you rarely get angry about something you don’t care about. Envy shows you an unresolved insecurity hiding in plain sight. Guilt (and sometimes shame) show you where there is a gap between the values you claim to hold yourself to, and what you did.
In some cases, two or more of these emotions dance together to give you a cocktail. Resentment shows you how fear and sadness and dishonesty are living rent-free in your relationship. Communication is a pipe that emotions flow through; resentment shows you that that pipe is clogged because one of you is afraid to have that talk.
Many of these emotions are difficult to process. So, many don’t. Instead, we restrict ourselves from feeling the anger and allow it to devolve. We turn anger into a bad fuel that burns us up from the inside.
Feeling sadness helps us get better. Blocking it only blocks you from feeling joy.
Restricting an emotion drains us more than the emotion itself. The paradox of difficult emotions is that the more you run away from them, the more you experience them. The more you lean into feeling them wholly, the less impact they have on you.
Humans love control. When we feel difficult emotions, we panic, thinking we’ll lose control. Thinking we’ll no longer be grounded. Our brains and nervous systems see that as a threat and nudge us to retract.
In fear, most of us do.
None of the difficult emotions is dangerous. Yes, they generate sensations we don’t like. Yes, they make us confront what we are unwilling to feel. Yes, we may get triggered and want to react and defend ourselves. But all the feelings have done is call our attention to something. What each of us do with that ping is completely up to us. It is what we do that often becomes dangerous.
It feels safe and often healthy to distance ourselves from what we feel. We can live life, function at work, play with friends, love others, be a respectable human being and die without ever feeling the full depth of our emotions. It’s like being ankle-deep in a swimming pool.
It is healthier if we go knee-deep, waist-deep, neck-deep and more, fully embracing the feelings we are avoiding.
If we choose to do the difficult work of taking out time to sit with those feelings, welcoming them, being kind to what’s happening within us, feeling them through, not resisting or enduring them, then we get to enjoy the beauty they’ve been masking all along.
When we feel them completely, without pushing back, without explaining them away, without directing any at others, without building a story around them, we find complete freedom at the end. Freedom that helps us welcome those emotions the next time they come.
As we do, we end up loving all we contain.
Slowly. Then, eventually.